On September 6, 2010 the Mille Lacs Messenger, a MN county newspaper, published the following letter of mine.

Dakota homeland

by Thomas Ivan Dahlheimer

In The Circle article "Dakota Rising" its author Jon Lurie describes how Wyatt Thomas (Dakota) traveled to Mille Lacs County from Nebraska where he lives on a reservation as a member of the Santee Dakota Tribe. Thomas said that Minnesota, and Ogechie lake in particular, was, to him, "home". Thomas was on a mission to scout his tribe's Minnesota ancestral lands. An important first step in reintroducing the Santee Dakota to their original homeland.

For centuries the Dakota Nation lived in this village on the shoreline of Ogechie Lake and a handful of others along the "Rum River" or Wakpa Wakan (Spirit River), the waterway that runs from Lake Mille Lacs (Mde Wakan, Spirit Lake) to the Mississippi River. In 1745, they were driven into the Minnesota and Mississippi river valleys by Anishinabe tribes invading from the east with French firearms. Thomas is one voice in a growing chorus of indigenous cultural leaders who agree that the reclamation of traditional lands is crucial to solving the Dakota mental health crisis due to the brutality of their historic treatment.

Thomas said, When I go home to Santee, "I will tell the relatives that everything we seek for healing—the herbs, the medicines and the stones—are still there in Minnesota, and we must return to them. I will tell them to remember that all of Minnesota is Dakota land. Even though they took it from us, one day we will have it back. One day it will be ours again, when the time is right."

Valerie Larson, the Urban American Indian Health Coordinator for the Office of Minority and Multicultural Health, says: "The Dakota people, due to the brutality of their historic treatment, are afflicted with a sort of collective post-traumatic stress disorder." The only solution, she says, "is a return to traditional ways of being, which can only occur by reclaiming the land upon which the people once thrived."

Then, in 1863, the Dakota were forcibly removed again after a bloody five-week conflict known as the Dakota Uprising, a tragic chapter of Dakota history from which the nation has yet to recover. Today the descendants of the expelled tribes live primarily on two reservations: the Nebraska location and the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota. The Dakota who live on tribal lands in Minnesota are largely descended from "friendlies"—a small group of Dakota families who, following the U.S.-Dakota war, were deemed non-threatening and allowed to return. They established four tiny reservations that represent a very small fraction of their former Minnesota land.

LeMoine LaPointe, director of the Twin Cities Healthy Nations Program at the Minneapolis American Indian Center, has been at work to do exactly what Larson is calling for: reclaiming their lands, waterways, health and culture through what LaPointe calls "indigenous health expeditions." A Dakota youth canoe expedition departed from the mouth Wakpa Wakan, on June 24, 2008. LaPointe said, "The Wakapa Wakan is an important spiritual and cultural artery to the Dakota who, until 1745, lived at Lake Mille Lacs and considered it the center of their world. These young people are taking the initiative to scout the length of the river in order for their tribe to become familiar with it, and in so doing, reclaim their tribal legacy."